Studia Postkolonialne

Roumiana Deltcheva, kanadyjska komparatystka pochodzenia bułgarskiego, odnotowała przed blisko dziesięciu laty, iŜ dyskurs kulturowy Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej (o ile zgodzimy się, Ŝe taki jednolity dyskurs w ogóle istnieje) "wciąŜ przeniknięty jest jedną, dominującą metaforą celu -'droga do Europy'. Pomimo róŜnych postaci, pod jakimi symbol ten przejawiał się w minionej dekadzie [1989[ -1999, jego pole semantyczne obejmuje ogólne poczucie peryferyjności, marginalizacji, izolacji i 'znajdowania się na zewnątrz'" 1 .

Between Western colonialism and Eastern imperialism. Postcolonial discourse versus developmental trajectory of East-Central European societies in the light of non-Marxian historical materialism. The purpose of this paper is to discuss a problem of applicability of postcolonial studies/postcolonial perspective to history of Polish society and wider-East Central Europe, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the first part, the main standpoints in Polish discussion are identified and the certain attempt of an application of categories of postcolonial studies are critically analyzed and discussed. Furthermore, in part two, the typology of social dominations (political, economic and cultural and variants of external subordinations) based on non-Marxian historical materialism is constructed in order in the chapter fourth to interpret the developmental trajectory of East-Central European societies. In the light of the presented interpretation, the 'resolving ability' of postcolonial perspective is too weak to be applied without essential modification to the history of societies living in this region of Europe, where the mosaic of different configurations of class domination shaped and evolved.

The article presents the problem of colonial and postcolonial discourse in relation to Eastern Galicia. It discusses
the forms of cultural domination existing throughout history in the region and draws attention to their conscious
“playing” by successive rulers of this territory, consequently leading to the formation of memory confl icts.

The book 'Socjalistyczny postkolonializm. Rekonsolidacja pamięci' (Socialist Postcolonialism: Memory Reconsolidation) is about the Polish postcolonial tradition of before 1989, which has been blanked out of memory. The year 2000, i.e., the year in which the Polish translation of Ewa Thompson’s book Imperial Knowledge. Russian Literature and Colonialism appeared, is taken as the beginning of Polish postcolonial thought. However, the general thesis of the present book is that widely understood postcolonialism functioned in Poland before 1989. The real beginning of thinking in postcolonial terms started with the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace, held in Wrocław in 1948. The purpose of the book is to reconstruct the rubbed out history of socialist postcolonialism and to determine the reasons why this cultural phenomenon was remembered/forgotten. This first task is achieved by analyzing political, press, literary, scientific and artistic discourses referring to the so-called Third World and its relations with the semi-peripheral Second World, i.e., Poland; while the second task is treated within an original conceptual framework for writing about remembering/forgetting, using the category of re/consolidation drawn from neuroscience and psychology. The work uses the terms “socialist postcolonialism” and “postcolonialism of the Second World” alternately and refers to postcolonial studies, although conceptually it is rooted in memory studies which are also seeing intense development in Poland.